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Java web application seems to go idle quickly in Tomcat

I’m new to java and tomcat. I’m developing a website in java using spring mvc. It’s deployed to a linux server that’s running Tomcat 8. Everything works fine when I deploy, it connects to the database great. The issue is that the site seems to go idle very quickly. I haven’t been able to time it exactly, but it seems like it only takes about a minute of inactivity for the entire site to go idle. Then the next request is extremely slow, loading in all my classes. I’m losing my sessions as well.

Is this a common occurrence? Does it sound like I’m doing something wrong in java? Tomcat? Both?

EDIT: In light of StuPointerException’s comment, I’ve updated my database connection management. I’m now using Apache dbcp. I will update if this resolves the problem. I want to give my QA tester ample time to hit my site some more.

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Answer

It’s difficult to answer your question directly without more information about your server setup.

For what it’s worth though, every time I see this kind of behaviour it’s down to a mis-configured database connection pool. There can be a significant overhead in creating new database connections.

If you don’t use a connection pool or you’re allowing connections in the pool to die (due to missing validation queries/checks) then you will start to see performance problems over time due to connection timeouts.

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